NEAR Protocol recently experienced an increase of 40%. The jump has come in the last 30 days, or one month, with NEAR now being valued at $1.51. The rise was rather 44.69% at the time of drafting this article.
What makes this relevant is the fact that the crypto industry is finally coming out of the winter season, with BTC and ETH leading the charge. Other tokens following the trend reflect that bullish sentiments are being rolled out across the ecosystem.
This rise has many reasons, including why NEAR could still be effective enough to be bought. Having said that, this could also be a time for enthusiasts to accumulate the token if the future indeed seems optimistic.
To start with the first reason, it is being reported that the NEAR Foundation has launched NEAR DA—Near Data Availability—specifically for developers. It is being called a groundbreaking innovation that has cost-efficient and robust mechanisms. NEAR DA has been launched in association with Madara by StarkNet, Vistara, Fluent, Movement Labs, and Dymension RollApps as its first users. More platforms are on the list to mark the entry of the product into the market.
NEAR DA has been crafted to offer a cost-effective and reliable solution to developers who can venture out to explore the benefits of the modular blockchain development landscape. Developers are now empowered to build their innovation at a gas fee that is negligible and predictable. What comes out of the production is expected to serve the end-users to its best capacity.
Moving on, the NEAR Foundation has highlighted its roadmap for the next two years. It has two major components, namely Experience and Core.
While Experience deals with the features and real experience of developers and users, Core aims to drive scalability and decentralization of the protocol. Also, making a move is the second phase of sharding to elevate the platform to 100 shards without any validator being able to track shards.
The recent updates and advancements have boosted the NEAR Protocol forecast, with the native token estimated to surpass the mark of $3 by the end of this year. Assuming it carries forward the positive trajectory, NEAR could also touch the mark of ~$4.31 by the end of 2024.
NEAR’s Blockchain Operating System, or BOS, is presently hosting a decentralized dApp store. This provides access to the initiative for more than seven million Coin98 users. Coin98 intends to leverage the decentralized nature of BOS to provide users with an improved experience.
Finally, the NEAR Foundation has announced joining hands with Polygon Labs for the development of a zero-knowledge (ZK) prover for Wasm blockchains and to enable greater interoperability across chains. Blockchains with WASM, or WebAssembly, can now leverage the liquidity of Ethereum, per the reports.
The aim is to build zkWASM and maximize customizability for developers so that users can choose from a large number of provers at the time of building.
The NEAR community is robust; however, the value of the NEAR Protocol can be affected by external circumstances and news. The NEAR platform is still in beta; therefore, not all of its features are available just yet. The future price of NEAR will be affected by market sentiment, demand and supply, and ecosystem growth.